People with less than £50,000 savings told they are “too poor” for financial advice

“Customers with investments of less than £50,000 are increasingly being turned away by their financial advisers. In 2014 just under a quarter of financial advisers showed customers with this level of assets the door, whereas in 2017 this figure rose to one in two advisers, according to new research by Schroders.

In total, one in four financial advisers asked clients to leave their practice in 2017 for not having enough money.

The research, based on a survey of 250 financial advisers, showed that the number of customers that advisers are no longer choosing to service has steadily grown over the past few years, with some customers being asked to leave if they have less than £100,000 or £200,000. …”

One thought on “People with less than £50,000 savings told they are “too poor” for financial advice”

Financial advisers now need to be highly qualified before they can give advice and they have to do a LOT of leg-work.

I have just been through this – and they wanted £500 up front and 1% if I accepted their recommendations. The result was a 100 page report which took some time to create.

If you have assets of less than £50,000 then this is simply not enough to justify their time and effort. And if you pay them enough to make it worth their while, then the benefit of their advice in improved growth of the pension pot will never cover the costs.

In other words, this is a structural issue in the personal pensions sector that only governments can correct. As a consequence of mis-selling due to advisers being employed or paid commission by pension providers, the government legislated to ensure that advisers were truly independent and stop pension companies giving advice themselves, there is now this gap for those with small pension pots.

To fix this the government needs to create a two tier system where simpler advice can be procured from less qualified people through a simpler and faster process that is much quicker and costs less.